As Israelis bunkered down in their bomb shelters last Saturday, even the grim prospect of approaching Iranian cruise missiles couldn’t suppress the Jewish sense of humour. Long-time Israel correspondent and author Matthew Kalman tweeted, ‘First direct flights from Iran to Israel since 1979’. As it became clear the drones would not reach their destination for hours, Israelis shared a meme suggesting dishes to prepare while awaiting the projectiles; 12 minutes for a ballistic missile? Just enough time to make a sandwich. Two hours for a cruise missile? Enough time to make matbucha, a slow-roasted capsicum and tomato dip; and for drones arriving in nine hours a slow-simmering Sabbath stew. Indeed, with Passover only days away on 23 April, others shared a parody of a Talmudic discussion from the Haggadah, the guide to the Passover meal which said, ‘It happened once that Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua, Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah, Rabbi Akiva, and Rabbi Tarfon were reclining in Bnei Brak and waiting for the unmanned armed vehicles that whole night…’.

Iran’s strangely theatrical attack of the drones on Saturday 13 April should make clear to even the most obtuse observer that the slow-motion war being waged in the Middle East is not a random collection of unrelated spats but a choreographed assault by Iran, at the head of a Shia crescent in which it has active militias operating from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza.

But this is not just about Israel. As a confidant of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman put it in 2016, the Arab world is facing not so much a Shia crescent as a Shia full moon with Iran explicitly seeking to topple Arab governments by funding insurgencies led by the Muslim Brotherhood and others. This is why Arab nations haven’t supported Hamas with the exception of Qatar which is the banker to Iran’s militias.

Jordan, for example, has come under growing pressure from Iran and its Shia militias in recent months and Iran threatened to attack it if it cooperated with Israel. Jordan however was not deterred. and worked with Israel, the US, the UK and France to intercept almost all the projectiles before they reached Israeli airspace using a command and control system set up more than four years ago according to a former head of the Israeli National Security Council Giora Eiland.

Israel was also helped by the fact that around half of the 120 ballistic missiles fired by Iran failed on launch or crashed mid-flight. In the end, only a 7-year-old Israeli Muslim girl was injured. Not quite the conflagration Iran was expecting.

So why did Iran engage in this show of strength that projected unmistakable weakness? Essentially, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) was determined to respond to what has become a highly targeted series of attacks on it.

Intelligence reports suggest that Yahya Sinwar, the local head of Hamas in Gaza, attacked Israel without giving advance warning to Iran or Hezbollah and neither was ready to join in a full-scale war on Israel.

Yet the Hamas war of 7 October prompted someone, presumably Israel, to assassinate the most senior member of the IRGC in Syria, General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the man responsible for orchestrating Iran’s proxies in the Shia crescent, and his deputy, Mohammad Haj Rahimi, along with ten others in an airstrike on an Iranian consular building in Damascus.

That was preceded by another airstrike in December which killed another senior IRGC officer Brigadier General Razi Mousavi. In between, on 3 January, the fourth anniversary of the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, the former head of Iran’s elite Quds (Jerusalem) Force, the arm of the IRGC that specialises in unconventional warfare and military intelligence operations, Islamic State terrorists killed 84 people who had gathered near Soleimani’s grave to mourn his passing.

It all suggests Iranian weakness, as did Iran’s response in December to a Sunni terrorist group based in Pakistan that killed eleven Iranian police officers. Iran launched missiles into Pakistan but nuclear-armed Pakistan retaliated with missiles, the first bombing attack on Iran since the Iran-Iraq war ended in the 1980s, and Iran backed down.

In this context, the attack has truly been an own goal for Iran. Israel was unfairly facing a chorus of Western condemnation for its attempt to defeat the openly genocidal Hamas and destroy its ability to use Gaza as a platform from which to launch a war of annihilation on Israel.

But with its crazy choreographed kabuki attack, Iran succeeded in uniting Israel’s flaky allies to defend it and reminded the world that if this is what Iran is going to do with its ballistic missiles, there is no way it can be allowed to give them a nuclear payload.

For those paying attention, like the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War, the attack mirrored those Russian strikes in which it ‘experimented with combinations of ballistic and cruise missiles alongside Iranian drones in Ukraine’. As if to drive home the point, Putin has pledged fighter jets and air defences to Iran including advanced missiles capable of shooting down stealth planes. It highlights the fact that not only is the West facing a coordinated attack in the Middle East, but the war in the Middle East is a key part of a coordinated attack by the Crinks (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) and their partners and proxies who seek to overthrow the international order.

The US first imposed sanctions on the IRGC in 2007, but it declared it a terrorist organisation in 2019, under the Trump administration, making it easier to deny visas to current and former IRGC members, and to make criminal charges against third parties who do not comply with its sanctions. Now, in response to Iran’s attack, Israel’s Deputy Ambassador to Australia Chris Cantor has said Israel plans to request that the Australian government also designate the IRGC a terrorist organisation while Iran’s embassy has said in a letter delivered to Sky News that, ‘Should the rogue Israeli Regime commit another wrongdoing, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s next steps will be more crushing and will give another unforgettable lesson to this heinous regime’. That should make the choice pretty simple even for the reality-challenged Albanese government. Its jejune proposal of endorsing a two-state solution at this point in time would simply gift Iran a launch pad for missiles to destroy Israel.

It is high time for those useful idiots who are calling for the land ‘from the river to the sea’ to be ‘free’, to admit that they are not just endorsing the replacement of a Jewish multi-faith democracy with an Islamic theocracy, but they are siding with the states responsible for atrocities in Ukraine, Xinjiang, Sudan, Myanmar, and all those countries routinely ignored by protesters as they parade their misbegotten solidarity with dictators who would mow them down in a moment without a second thought.